Synopses & Reviews
The major character in To Seek a Newer World epitomizes something of his nation's history. He is Dr. Daniel Rutherford, a young man returning home from sorrow in the United States. He had gone there and then to England to study and had married an Afro-Caribbean lady, only to see her die of embolism shortly after the birth of their baby. He is returning home to reclaim his African identity and to carve out a new life. Daniel Rutherford's story is a moving odyssey of pain, disillusion and frustrated idealism-one that leads from the shadow of the valley of death to a tranquillity and capacity for love he never thought possible. Daniel Rutherford is a character few readers will forget. Nor will they forget the other characters who appear in To Seek a Newer World: Pastor Peter Rutherford (Daniel Rutherford's father) with his strange, black suit, the high priest who buys the suit by offering him a cow, Dr. Felix Kamara, Daniel Rutherford's bosom friend and confidant, Kla Wilson, who tries to poison Daniel....Compassionate and kindhearted Maureen, Daniel Rutherford's second wife, who has a stabilizing influence on him despite the vicissitudes of life. In To Seek a Newer World, Robert H. Brown has created a rich tapestry of the woes, delights and contradictions of life and love in a modern, mythical republic, a universal metaphor for the human condition.
Synopsis
Remembrance of Things Past is a work of doomsday fiction set in a modern, mythical country in West Africa. A sequel to
To Seek a Newer World, the novel's major characters acquire their new personas during an inter-ethnic civil war that devastates their homeland: Daniel Rutherford as an observant chronicler of his times, Felix Kamara as an ambitious alcoholic and incurable romantic, and Maureen Rutherford as a resolute divorc e and fortune-hunter. In this streamlined novel, Robert H. Brown presents a gloomy picture of a society dogged by sectionalism, ethnicity, "ethnic cleansing," and how warlords and rebels take part in indulgent killing, wanton destruction of infrastructure, and dwelling homes. He also depicts a society in which innocent children and civilians behave and act to the privations of wartime because poverty is grimmer and more widespread. As the novel ends, Daniel Rutherford and Felix Kamara are seen strapped in their seats in British Caledonian on their way to their homeland from involuntary exile in England to help in the construction of peace and amity on the ruins of the tragedy of war.
Remembrance of Things Past is a magnificent story of passion, love, betrayal, ambition, and pervasive violence.